CORUSCANT – Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

Amusing post JBC.
If you want to start to understand the killing of OBL, you can’t do much better than listen to this man. From wiki, “His research on international terrorism was officially used by the 9/11 Commission in Washington DC.”

saw this on boingboing
the comments are priceless and the sidebars pretty amusing as well
you can almost hear that regulator and James Earl Jones voice

nice pic Smith! good ol trading-arms-for-hostages Saint Ronnie!

i dunno knarly, I listened to that guy and wasn’t impressed, he hedged his bets left, right, center, up (uh oh, just lost shcb) and down. mb they do have him alive (doubt it) and this is all an elaborate psyop, but I think they were happy to have him dead and grab all his computers and hard drives (what a treasure trove that must be!) The Rs wet dream of torturing OBL would have been a rallying point for psychopaths (both R and ienj). Better a dead terrorist than a live symbol of islamic extremist nut jobbery.

Obama. Cleaning up Rethugglican failures since 2008.
(now can we finally close Gitmo? also, can we please put John Yoo and Cheney in jail? thx)

Kenobi was on Tatooine, hiding in plain sight. Surely, the Tatooine government knew of OWK’s presence there. If the Tatooing government was harboring OWK, why are we still supporting them? Personally, I think that it’s time for regime change.

Enk,
That wasn’t “hedging bets left right and centre” that was making it clear that no-one has been given sufficient information to make an intelligent bet. Take off your blinders. Torturing OBL would be stupid, the smart thing would have been to humiliate him and his followers in front of the world in a court of law and when found guilty execute him. He got off with a seriously light, quick death.

Also,
“I think that there is an important point being missed among all this discussion. Would the U.S government especially the Bush regime, really want Osama on the stand. Bush is already considered a war criminal in most countries, can you imagine the information OBL could divulge in the witness box. Make no mistake, DEAD MEN DON’T TELL TALES.”

More to the point(s):

For nine years I wrote and I said that Osama bin Laden was not hiding in a cave. I’m not a cave expert, I was just using my common sense. He was a multimillionaire crime boss (using religion as his cover), and those guys just don’t live in caves. He had people killed under the guise of religion, and not many in the media bothered to explain that every time Osama referenced Islam, he wasn’t really quoting Islam. Just because Osama said he was a “Muslim” didn’t make it so. Yet he was called a Muslim by everyone. If a crazy person started running around mass-killing people, and he did so while wearing a Wal-Mart blazer and praising Wal-Mart, we wouldn’t automatically call him a Wal-Mart leader or say that Wal-Mart was the philosophy behind his killings, would we?

Yet, we began to fear Muslims and round them up. We profiled people from Muslim nations at airports. We didn’t profile multi-millionaires (in fact, they now have their own fast-track line to easily get through security, an oddity considering every murderer on 9/11 flew in first class). We didn’t run headlines that said “Multi-Millionaire Behind the Mass Murder of 3,000” (although every word in that headline is true). You can say his wealth had nothing to do with 9/11, but the truth is, there is no way he could have kept Al Qaeda in business without having the millions he had.

Some believe that this was a “war” we were in with al Qaeda – and you don’t do trials during war. It’s thinking like this that makes me fear that, while bin Laden may be dead, he may have “won” the bigger battle. Let’s be clear: There is no “war with al Qaeda.” Wars are between nations. Al Qaeda was an organization of fanatics who committed crimes. That we elevated them to nation status – they loved it! It was great for their recruiting drive.

We did exactly what bin Laden said he wanted us to do: Give up our freedoms (like the freedom to be assumed innocent until proven guilty), engage our military in Muslim countries so that we will be hated by Muslims, and wipe ourselves out financially in doing so. Done, done and done, Osama. You had our number. You somehow knew we would eagerly give up our constitutional rights and become more like the authoritarian state you dreamed of. You knew we would exhaust our military and willingly go into more debt in eight years than we had accumulated in the previous 200 years combined.

Yeah, I don’t think you can fault the SEALs for killing him on the spot. Put yourself in their shoes – the most wanted and dangerous terrorist ever is standing in front of you in a dark room with people screaming and guns laying around, he could’ve had a suicide vest on, who knows. It must have been so intense.

I think OBL getting shot in the head in his own house by a U.S. commando is a pretty satisfying ending, imo.

I just heard on the holochannel that ‘Ubi-wan’ had a large stash of really raunchy ‘wookie pr0n’ at his hideout. Lord Vader is carefully reviewing the holo cubes to thwart future plots by these ‘rebels’…. a trrrrst by any other name!